Today, indigenous communities throughout North America are grappling with the dual issues of language loss and revitalization. While many communities are making efforts to bring their traditional languages back through educational programs, for some communities these efforts are not enough or have come too late to stem the tide of language death, which occurs when there are no remaining fluent speakers and the language is no longer used in regular communication. The Maliseet language, as spoken in the Tobique First Nation of New Brunswick, Canada, is one such endangered language that will either be revitalized and survive or will die off.

Defying Maliseet Language Death is an ethnographic study by Bernard C. Perley, a member of this First Nation, that examines the role of the Maliseet language and its survival in Maliseet identity processes. Perley examines what is being done to keep the Maliseet language alive, who is actively involved in these processes, and how these two factors combine to promote Maliseet language survival. He also explores questions of identity, asking the important question: “If Maliseet is no longer spoken, are we still Maliseet?” This timely volume joins the dual issues of language survival and indigenous identity to present a unique perspective on the place of language within culture.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the generosity and the
encouragement of many people. I have had the great fortune to have
outstanding teachers, friends, and family throughout the duration of
my research and the writing of this book. The strengths and gifts that...

Notes on Terminology and Orthography

This ethnography uses the terms aboriginal and its derivatives interchangeably
with Native American and American Indian as the context
of the discussion requires. The Canadian context favors aboriginal and
aboriginality to refer to the indigenous peoples of Canada. American...

1. The Specter of Language Death

On the reservation they call it “Indian time,” and this was the perfect
example. I was on time, but then again I had spent years in the white
world. The notice said 2:00 p.m. at the school so I was there at 2:00
p.m. One by one people began to trickle in. Everyone on the reservation
knew the meeting would not start until two-thirty at the earliest...

2. “Tipping” toward Maliseet Language Death

In the late nineteenth century the United States expansion had stretched
out to the West Coast and the dream of transcontinental “manifest
destiny” was finally fulfilled. In the taming of the West there was still
some work to be done in pacifying hostile Indians. The military machine
that was used to win the “war between the states” was turned to winning...

3. Programming Language Maintenance

The formal exercise of diagnosing the vitality of Maliseet language in
terms such as those presented in the previous chapter conveys rational
knowledge of the causes and factors that contribute to the phenomenon
referred to as language death. The seeming objectivity and rationality
of linguistic diagnostic analyses are not ideologically neutral. Experts...

4. From Spoken Maliseet to Text

One day I watched students at Mah-Sos School come into their Maliseet
language class carrying pencils because they had just come out of the
French class. Sue asked why they had pencils, and they responded
by saying that they were told they would need pencils “because they...

5. Elementary Language Curriculum and Practice

Mah-Sos School was the elementary school on the reservation when I
started my research. The school provided instruction to kindergarten
students as well as students in grades one through six. During the
years of field research, the school was located at the heart of the village
next to the medical clinic and fire hall, adjacent to the ballpark...

6. Death by Suicide

The form of language death that best characterizes the Maliseet case
for Tobique First Nation is death by suicide. I argue that the Maliseet
language is undergoing a shift in ontological states from a living language
to a language imminently to be dead. I do so for the following
reasons. First, it recognizes the language experts’ “problematic” use...

7. Language and Being in Maliseet Worlds

The issue of identity has a vast literature in anthropology alone, and
Native American articulations of identity have a rich history that goes
back to time immemorial.1 Time and space being limited for this project,
I confine my discussion to three key components of Maliseet identity
that I found to be particularly salient for this ethnography. They are...

8. Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity

Linguists, sociolinguists, and other language scholars have published
numerous comparative studies of endangered languages detailing common
causes for the decline of minority and indigenous languages. My
analysis of the Maliseet case at Tobique indicates that the language is
indeed in serious jeopardy. Even though the many factors contributing...

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